PA-13 Rep. Allyson Schwartz – Balanced Budgets are “Extreme”

Personally, I’m not big on the balanced budget amendment either. I think the 2/3 override vote will become a “rubber stamp” for future congresses (if there’s one thing both parties can agree on, it’s spending money!) and Constitutionally limited spending would be less than 18% of GDP anyway. Rep. Schwartz’ commentary is stunning, though. Balancing the budget is an “extreme ideological demand”? I would have guessed that continuing to spend ourselves into poverty would be be the “extreme” position. Silly me… Have to brush up on my newspeak, I guess.

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Rep. Allyson Schwartz, senior member of the House Budget Committee, delivered the following speech today on floor of the U.S. House of Representatives during debate on the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act, H.R. 2560.

“I rise in opposition to the Republican Cut, Cap, and Balance Act. Republicans continue to play politics rather than do what is best for our country.

They are once again holding American families and businesses hostage by threatening to allow the United States to default on its debt unless their extreme ideological demands are met.

This plan is not the balanced approach that is best for our country. It ends the Medicare guarantee for seniors and slashes education and opportunity for the next generation of Americans.

It inhibits our ability to foster an environment for private sector economic growth by cutting any chance of investment in scientific research and technology, roads, bridges and highways.

The Republican plan is disastrous to our fragile economy and will devastate America’s future economic competitiveness.

The Republican Majority has yet to produce legislation that puts the American economy back on track and Americans back to work.

This legislation guarantees that we won’t meet our obligations as a nation to our seniors or to our children and it will dramatically reduce our ability to compete in a global economy.

Make no mistake, the Republican plan is and has always been to Cut Social Security and Medicare, Cap economic opportunity, and Balance the budget on the backs of middle class families.

Cut, cap and balance is bad for American families, bad for our businesses, and bad for the nation’s economic future.”

She has valid points. The ideological divide is this: For decades, we've been cutting taxes on the very rich. Capital gains, a form of income almost exclusively enjoyed by the rich, had its rate chopped in half. You didn't see them chop the ordinary income tax rate in half.

As a result, the rich became fabulously richer (fact shown in US wealth statistics) and the debt grew faster (undeniable). The middle class did not share in the productivity gains (profits) of the technological boom, except for the ability to buy cheap gadgets built from poor foreign workers. The ideologues on the right are sending a clear message. Somebody other than their rich patrons must be forced to pay for these wars, etc

If anyone thinks these wars are designed to protect the ordinary Joe from al Qaeda, all he has to do is step away from the play on fear and see that the goal is control of a geography. History repeats. Did our predecessors slaughter the native Americans to protect us from savagery, or to expand the land grab? It can be rationally argued on both sides, but in my mind, it couldn't be clearer. The land grab was the goal, and they peddled fear of Indians to promote it.

I feel for all the servicemen and women who think they are serving the people, but are really instruments of corporatist America. They are enlisting to Exxon, Halliburton and friends, who collectively run a joint venture which operates under the assumed name of "the United States."